Throat coat

Next up in our amble toward the end of 50 Sci-Fi Classics, we have two films from 1960 that already have a bunch of things in common, like extensive portfolios of feminine pulchritude. (Or attempts thereunto, since de gustibus etc.)

The thing that really grabbed us, though, is that in both movies -- à la Homer Simpson's tragic, recurring physical abuse of his son Bart -- one or more characters show off a yen for wrapping their hands around other people's necks.

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Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
[aka Body in the Web / Ein Toter hing im Netz]

Objective Grade: D-

Fräulein Furtherance: C-

Was it possible to make a full-on sexploitation romp in 1960? Not sure, but whether necessity or caution is at work, this trashy Teutonic venture tries to hedge its bets. Half horror movie, half T&A exhibition, it succeeds in neither, with amusing results.

In fairness, about 10 minutes of nudity has been chopped out of this print, with just a few distant shots of skinny-dipping fräuleins remaining in the mix.

Those who wish to perv, then, are left with "scantily-clad" as their only option -- though, to the film's credit, it includes a larger variety of body types than we'd see in most other productions, then or now.

"So wait, why are these women scantily clad?", asked no one. Well, we spend the first 10 minutes of Horrors of Spider Island putting together a troupe of "dancers" for a trip to Singapore. After some leg-ogling --

-- and male-gazing --

-- plus a hilariously deflating rejection of an actual classically-trained dancer, we're off. But, surprise! Somewhere out past Honolulu, their plane catches fire and crashes headfirst into the ocean.

Somehow, all the models survive ("Wait, didn't you say 'headfirst'?"), along with their manager, and they make their way to an island whose secret they soon discover. If only they'd known the English-language title of this film.

However, if you're expecting Arachnophobia with sturdy thighs, things don't really play out that way. Instead we get some sort of spider, man, who roams the island and occasionally pops up to strangle lone wanderers --

-- or even just pays them a visit at home. How convenient!

Soon enough two strapping young men show up -- one stolid, the other devil-may-care -- and their presence sows discord among the ladies. Add a couple additional murders, a romantic plot, some torches and quicksand, and you can probably guess the rest.

We seem to remember enjoying Horrors of Spider Island though now, months after watching it, it's hard to recall exactly why. Maybe it was the comically lazy ending, or the array of stock characters -- the seductress, the innocent, etc. -- that populates the troupe of dancers.

Maybe it was the adorable model -- that is, the adorable spider model.

Or maybe we were amused by the goofy dialogue, the incessant catfights, and the laughable Southern accent used for one character's dubbed voice (Ann, played by Helga Neuner). Or maybe it's all the sexy-sax music, who knows?

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Goliath and the Dragon (1960)

Objective Grade: C-
Shattered Dreams Surplus: B-

Aaaand it's back to peplum, and Mark Forest as Goliath, hero of Thebes. Poor guy, he just wants to go back to his home and family, and chill out. But as the movie begins, he's in the final stages of a mission to retrieve a "blood diamond" stolen by the evil tyrant Eurystheus (Broderick Crawford) of Ocalia.

The introductory narration sets the scene:

"Legend has it that Goliath served the God of Vengeance, and the Goddess of the Four Winds. In return for his devotion, he was said to be favored with immortality: he would never know death at the hands of any mortal man."

That last bit robs the narrative of some of its drama, no?

But we get an interesting twist along the way, as somewhere in the process of "fighting a three-headed fire-breathing dog, a giant bat, a centaur and finally a dragon" (to quote the DVD sleeve, which makes the movie sound like a boss rush), Goliath forsakes the gods in frustration. Not only does he end up smashing the very statue to which he returned the blood diamond, he actually causes a solar eclipse with his rage. Dude.

How do things go so wrong? Well, it all starts with family conflict: Goliath's brother Illus (Sandro Moretti) is in love with Thea (Federica Ranchi). Her parents once ruled Ocalia, but were poisoned by Eurystheus, who now holds Thea captive (and intends to marry her against her will). Illus sneaks into Ocalia to see her, though Goliath has explicitly forbidden it --

-- but he gets himself caught on the way out.

Rather than execute Illus on the spot as he'd prefer, though, King Eurystheus heeds the counsel of his Machiavellian advisor, Tindar (Giancarlo Sbragia). This is despite the latter's penchant for describing him as "only a mass of fat and muscle, full of violence and brutality".

Most of us don't take advice from people who insult us, but eh, you do you, Eurystheus.

Tindar observes that Illus could be more useful if they let him escape -- after convincing him that Goliath secretly wants Thea for his own. And hey, beautiful slave Alcinoe (Wandisa Guida) can help with that part, since it goes along nicely with her own schemes -- though sleeping with Tindar (who has the hots for her) isn't one of them.

Cue drama! Illus shares the fake news with Goliath's wife Dejanira, who's assembling a huge feast for Goliath's return, and is hardly pleased to learn her husband wants to bed her brother-in-law's fiancée (even though he doesn't). And when Goliath informs Dejanira mid-massage that he'll kill Illus if he sees Thea, that doesn't help matters. (Apparently her father killed his parents, hence the hostility.)

Meanwhile, Goliath heads out to meet some friends and bumps into Alcinoe, who's on her way to deliver a vial of poison for Illus to give his brother at the feast (using a cover story, concocted by Tindar, that it'll just make Goliath "come to his senses" and stop wanting Thea). Alcinoe gets thrown from her horse --

-- and attacked by a hilariously bumbly bear (overlooked in the Mill Creek boss rush recap), whom Goliath dispatches.

Naturally, she immediately falls for her rescuer -- but disappears shortly afterward, leaving Goliath bewildered.

Goliath gets home and, since Illus refuses to stop seeing Thea, he humiliatingly ties him to a tree --

-- whereupon a slave girl of Ocalia arrives to drop off the vial Alcinoe failed to deliver. Will Illus kill his brother? Well, that depends on whether Alcinoe and Thea can join forces to send out a psychic warning. That's what people did before cell phones, you know.

Soon we get an execution by elephant head-crushing (a real thing back in the day!) --

-- and a disturbing prophecy from the Goddess of the Four Winds: "In time your brother shall reign in Ocalia, Goliath -- but it will cost the life of the woman who loves you!"

Now, we guessed what this really means, and you probably have too. But Goliath is unfamiliar with concepts like "dramatic irony", so with his vision of domestic tranquility destroyed, he wrecks the temple of the gods and unleashes one of the great lines of dubbed Italian peplum cinema:

"Collapse like my shattered dreams!"

If all this seems a mite convoluted, well, it is -- and the last act comes together in about the way you'd expect. But at least the production values are decent, and the women good-looking, so this peplum wasn't too much of a pain in the neck to soldier through.

That said Broderick Crawford isn't especially believable as a warlord -- as someone on another site noted, his persona reads "gangster", not "warrior" -- though the gnarly scar helps a little.

We mustn't forget to mention the rapey centaur, Polymorphus:

Or this wonderful dragon head:

And we simply have to include a screenshot of the (ahem) "giant bat" in defeat, which looks suspiciously like an Ewok gone Brian Peppers or something:

Arms and the man

Well, it was nice to have a perfect total of 100 posts for a couple months. But it's high time we came to grips with 50 Sci-Fi Classics -- a set into which we've dipped our toe before, admittedly, with movies like Eegah!, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and our beloved Snowbeast. And hey, we like science fiction, right?

Here, though, we're faced with the grim reality that, in the 250-pack version of 50 Sci-Fi Classics, at least 12 of its 49* movies are peplum: swords and sandals, musclemen and imperious queens, the whole works. Watching such a film every so often is one thing, but working our way through a dozen of them is likely to be a chore, especially with Mill Creek's hraka-quality transfers.

*(Yes, 49 movies: after removing 6 films like The Alpha Incident and The Wasp Woman that would otherwise be duplicated elsewhere on the 250-pack -- which is, in itself, laudable -- Mill Creek replaced them instead with four peplum epics, plus Lucifer Complex.)

Still, if we've gotten through endless identical 1930s movies with wisecracking female reporters and unconventional poison delivery systems -- each of them merely an interchangeable (and hat-wearing) part of an infinite whole, an isolated slice of an spunky Mandelbrot set -- then we can handle this.

So, it's time to put some pep(lum) in our step(lum) and begin our Herculean ordeal with these two films, both of which prominently feature a tug-of-war contest with a strong man in the middle.

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Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops (1961)
(aka Maciste nella terra dei ciclopi)

Grade: C-

As you can see, fans of hue, tint and shade aren't likely to get their chroma fix from Mill Creek's edition of this Gordon Mitchell vehicle. Almost every color has somehow been eradicated from this print, leaving a palette dominated by the dull reddish-brown you see here. The only major exceptions are the opening titles, which have something vaguely resembling blue --

-- and this, which must have been the greenest dress ever (made of leprechaun sweat and emerald juice, presumably) to cut through the sepia murk:

Fortunately, despite the visual shortcomings of this copy, Atlas in the Land of Cyclops is entertaining and brisk enough to be tolerable, even at 98 minutes. The plot is somewhere between other peplum films we've seen -- say, Fire Monsters Against the Son of Hercules -- and a "Save my baby!" film like The Lion Man, though Maciste/Atlas's relationship with lions...

...is rather more complex.

No, no, it's not that kind of film: the love interest isn't leonine, but instead the more vulpine Queen Capys (Chelo Alonso), a descendant of Circe. Yes, that Circe, the one famously outfoxed by Ulysses -- well, Odysseus, but this is an Italian film.

And if you remember who else famously got tricked by Ulysses -- or, hell, if you know the title of this movie -- then you can probably guess who else is sure to show up before the end.

So let's see -- there's a curse, and a plan to sacrifice the first-born son ("and little Fabio"!) of King Agisandro (Germano Longo). No points for guessing who he descends from: come on, turkey!

Naturally Maciste intervenes, and in the process, somehow gets caught up in the most gratuitously racialized tug-of-war we've ever seen. Here's the team on stage left:

And now, the team on stage right:

Yeah, that's, uh...a thing. And just like in real life, nobody wins this sort of contest -- except the guy with the power who's really pulling the strings.

With the Strom Thurmond Memorial Tug-of-War done and dusted, Maciste captures the eye of the queen, to whom his muscular physique and decidedly non-sycophantic behavior are a major turn-on. But don't take our word for it, ask Capys:

"Ever since you came into my life, you have made me forget everything. Even my duties as a queen -- and my pride as a woman. Everything."

...well, except that whole curse and revenge thing, I've still got that in my Palm Pilot. But the rest? Blank slate, baby.

Soon enough there's a drugged drink -- shades of The Lion Man, yet again -- and a jealous rival:

The rest you can probably guess, so have a silly dance routine and let's move on.

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Hercules and the Masked Rider (1963)

Grade: C

Now this was a surprise: not B.C., but very much A.D., and set in 16th-century Spain to boot. Plus Hercules (Sergio Ciani) isn't even the main character. Don't get us wrong, he's definitely in the mix, and here's that tug-of-war we promised you. (This one's even racism-free.)

But the real story is one of intrigue and betrayal, honor lost and regained, and lovers besieged by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our hero, Don Juan (Mimmo Palmara), is in love with Dona Blanca (José Greci), and they try to elope --

-- but instead he gets exiled from the lands of her father Don Francisco (Renato Navarrini). You see, Dad hopes to marry her off to Don Ramiro Suarez (Arturo Dominici), a perfidious nobleman who might as well have "I AM EVIL" tattooed on his forehead.

So Don Juan falls in with the gypsies -- and once again, if you know the title of the film, you can guess what identity he soon adopts.

Hijinks, gypsy dances, and swordfights ensue, just as you'd expect.

In fact this whole film is largely "just as you'd expect", not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Maybe we were just relieved to get an unexpected respite from sandals and Roman architecture; maybe it's just that we don't know from Zorro -- let alone its ripoffs.

But though Hercules and the Masked Rider is a standard-issue film in every way, we didn't mind it all, and even sort of enjoyed it. Its edge over Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops? Well, it has a drugging, and colors too. (So did Curse of the Headless Horseman, but you get our point.)

So instead of boring you with the details of its subplots -- mostly involving other pairs of young lovers -- let's finish things off with five people in a tree.